‘What’s the excitement?’ I said. But he wasn’t the type who would plead for me to let him go, either. Whether this was due to obstinacy, or to a chronic lack of vocabulary I didn’t know. ‘We don’t want bloodshed, do we? Not this early on in our relationship.’
He gasped as if his chest would burst. ‘I’ve seen you before.’
I squeezed him harder into the half-nelson. ‘I’m Michael Cullen. We met ten years ago, remember?’ While his elastic-band computer was processing this bit of information I let him go and jumped clear, putting myself in such a state of defence that when he regained the vertical he made a rapid gut-decision not to carry on the feud, at least for the time being. ‘I’m working for Moggerhanger as well,’ I said, ‘so if there’s any argy-bargy he’ll fire us both. You know that. Now lay off.’
His pig-eye cunning, which hid softening of the brain behind, stood him in good stead for once. ‘You was reading my fucking book.’
‘I needed intellectual stimulus.’
‘And you was on my fucking bed.’
‘I can’t read standing up. And once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.’
He sat down, mollified for the moment. ‘Fucking good, ennit?’
‘Best book I ever read.’
He smiled. ‘Yeh.’
I sat on the bed. ‘You read a lot.’
‘Every minute, when I’m not fucking birds and ’ittin’ people, and driving one of Lord Moggerhanger’s flash Rollers with all the dazzle-lights on.’
I pulled on my whisky flask. ‘Like a drop?’
He took a swig. I wouldn’t trust him five minutes with a twenty-year-old banger. ‘Can’t drink much in case I’m called out,’ he said. ‘We’re on tap all the time. Could be four in the morning. There’s no night and day for Lord Claud.’
‘What about time off?’
A laugh made him look human. ‘When you’re dead you get time off. But now he’s got you, he might let me go home a few days.’
‘You’ve been busy?’
His eyes narrowed, perhaps at the notion that I was pumping him. ‘Just looking around for somebody to hit and kick.’
‘Who for? You might as well tell me. I expect I’ll have to find him sooner or later.’
‘The boss tells, not me.’
‘Fair enough.’ I opened my case, and found The Return of the Native which I’d finished on the train. Bridgitte had read it three years ago when she’d done an Open University course. ‘Try this. It ain’t as good as Sidney Blood, but it’s all right.’
He turned it over like a piece of cold toast. ‘Don’t like books about wogs.’
‘Wogs?’
‘Fucking blackies. Can’t stand ’em.’
‘It isn’t about blacks.’ I found it hard not to laugh. ‘I’m a native myself.’
‘You don’t fucking look it. You’re like me.’
I let that pass. ‘We’re all natives.’
‘You’re fucking pig-ignorant.’
‘You’re a native as well.’
He stood up, looked at himself in a piece of mirror by the door and straightened his tie. He wore an expensive grey suit and a silk shirt which was ready for the wash. Being of a similar build to his employer, I wondered if they weren’t Moggerhanger’s throwaways. ‘I’ve drunk your drink,’ he said, ‘but you ought to be careful what you’re saying.’
I don’t know why I persisted. ‘I’m a native of Nottingham because I was born there. Lord Moggerhanger is a native of Bedfordshire because he was born there. You’re a native of Walworth.’
‘Kennington.’
‘Kennington, then, because you were born there. The blacks in London aren’t natives, unless they were born here, and then they are. That’s all it means. The Return of the Native is about a man who comes back to the place he was born at.’
His mind veered off my explanation. It was too long. ‘I’ve got to be going. Got to go and see my mum. Knock her about a bit, otherwise she won’t fink I love her.’ He winked, as if he’d been taking the piss out of me. ‘Don’t break my wanker,’ he said as he swaggered out of the door.
I lay full length on the bed, and decided I liked being at work, and went to sleep wondering how Maria was getting on with Bridgitte. Being so different, they seemed made for each other. Perhaps Bridgitte would send for the children from Holland. Maria thought Upper Mayhem a paradise and would work for nothing as long as she was allowed to stay, though she wouldn’t go short of money — I’d see to that. She and Bridgitte would settle down and keep the place going for when I needed a refuge from the busy world. I laughed at the picture and, a final vision showing my homely settlement in flames, thought that at least I had done some positive good by finding Bill Straw a hiding place.
Kenny Dukes was right. At four in the morning the blower went. It was fixed to the wall by the door so I had to cross the room to answer it. ‘Come to the house,’ Moggerhanger said. ‘And I don’t mean in your pyjamas.’
I smartened up and, wide awake, crossed the yard to headquarters. The man by the door, no doubt with a gun under his coat, was Cottapilly, a big heavy swine who always went upstairs as quiet as a cloth-footed fly, so nimble on his feet that people expected to see a small man. He then put their surprise to maximum advantage. Afterwards, neat little turds of fag ash were seen on the stairs, as if someone had gone up on their hands and knees. He wore no collar or tie, but his boots were impeccably polished.
I was even more certain that some important scheme was being put into action when I saw Jericho Jim sitting in the corridor outside Moggerhanger’s office. He was thin and of medium height, with thick grey hair and an incredibly lined face, though from a distance you would have taken him for thirty instead of fifty. Each icy blue eye shone like the point of a pen torch that a doctor shoves down your gullet to look at your tonsils. He’d been most of his life in prison, but had escaped so many times, even from Dartmoor, that they called him Jericho Jim, though his real name was Wilfred. He always ate the middle from a loaf first, on the assumption that he might die in the next five seconds or in case some well-wisher had put a file inside. It was a matter of old habits dying hard, and that by their feeding shall you know them. He stopped pulling the comb through his wavy hair to run his hands over my jacket and trousers.
‘Do you think I’m barmy?’ I said.
‘Instructions,’ he lisped. ‘They’re waiting for you.’
The room wasn’t as empty as it had been the day before. Moggerhanger stood behind his desk wearing a flowered dressing-gown that came down to the floor, and smoking the kind of cigar that his doctor had said would put him in his bury-box. But I suppose it was a case of once a lord, always a lord. His manner hadn’t altered from when I first saw him. There was an open map on the table, and as soon as Pindarry closed the door Moggerhanger pointed to it. ‘Michael, can you read one of them?’
‘Like a book.’ I’d gone walking and cycling with Smog in the school holidays, and he was the one who had taught me to read maps.
‘You’re the only one who can, then,’ he said, ‘apart from myself. That’s why I took you on.’ The room was blindingly lit from a series of striplights flush with the ceiling. Two men I didn’t know sat at a table by the wall, earphones on and their backs to me, and I heard the crackle of police voices from one and the bird noises of morse from the other. Moggerhanger looked over his shoulder and said to Pindarry: ‘He’ll be in time if he sets off now. The boat gets in at eight o’clock.’ From behind his desk he asked: ‘Do you know where Goole is?’